User role editing for WordPress. Manage user roles, control capabilities and permissions, and restrict admin access for any role.
| Last updated | October 14, 2026Updated in the last 3 months |
|---|---|
| Tested up to | WordPress 7.1.4Covers WordPress 7.1.4, the current release |
| Needs WordPress | 5.5 or newer |
| Needs PHP | 7.2.5 or newer |
| First published | July 30, 2012 |
| Support, last two months | 2 of 2 threads resolved (100%) |
4.7 / 5 from 143 reviews
| 5 stars | 128 |
|---|---|
| 4 stars | 3 |
| 3 stars | 5 |
| 2 stars | 1 |
| 1 star | 6 |
PublishPress Capabilities is a user role editor for WordPress. You can edit user roles, create new ones, and control every capability and permission on your site — without writing code.
You can manage all your WordPress user roles, from Administrators and Editors to Authors, Contributors, Subscribers and custom roles. Each user role gets exactly the capabilities your site needs, and every change is backed up automatically so you can roll it back.
Beyond roles, PublishPress Capabilities cleans up what each role actually sees. You can decide what authors see when they’re writing posts, hide any feature on the block editor or Classic Editor screens, and remove items from the WordPress dashboard, toolbar and Profile screen.
The Key Features of PublishPress Capabilities
The opening of the plugin's own description. The full text, installation notes and changelog are on its WordPress.org page.
Go to Capabilities > Roles in your WordPress admin menu. You can create a new role from scratch, or copy an existing role and adjust it — copying is usually faster, because you start from a working set of capabilities instead of an empty one.
Changing permissions is the one part of WordPress where a mistake can shut you out of your own site, so PublishPress Capabilities is built to make that recoverable:
Yes. The plugin is tested against the current WordPress release, and the Editor Features screen lets you hide features in both the block editor and the Classic Editor — sidebar panels such as Tags, Categories and Excerpt, the Publish button, and even the post title, body or permalink, per role.
Many plugins add admin menu links with no way to control who sees them. PublishPress Capabilities adds an Admin Menus screen where you can mark any top-level or sub-menu link as blocked for a given role.
In the free version, you can hide a large amount of the admin without touching menus: use Admin Features to remove toolbar items and dashboard widgets, Profile Features to strip the Profile screen, and the…
PublishPress Capabilities is a user role editor that offers you the ability to backup and restore your WordPress user permissions. This feature is very helpful if you want to test out changes on your site, or you’ve installed a new plugin that has changed your site’s permissions.
If you really need to clean up and refresh your site, PublishPress Capabilities does allow you to restore the default WordPress permissions. Go to Capabilities > Backup and click the “Reset Roles” tab. Before you take next step, make sure to read this warning:
The full changelog can be found on GitHub.
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Read from the WordPress.org plugin API on , when WordPress 7.1.4 was the current release. WordPress.org rounds active installs into buckets. These are the directory's figures, not my verdict, and I haven't tested this plugin.